Brilliant Leap

Documentum Pros- For job security, you're going to have to learn to stand out in a crowd

A Documentum developer recently sent "Documentum Guru" Johnny Gee an e-mail asking which technologies he should learn to insure his job security for the future. Johnny wrote a blog post answering the question from a technical perspective and thought that I might have some ideas from a career perspective.

Before I get into too much detail, I think it's worth mentioning that the answer, in part, depends on whom you work for now and whom you envision being employed by in the future. If you are/see yourself working for an EMC Partner systems integration/consulting firm, like most Documentum bloggers (e.g. Johnny, Laurence Hart, Lee Smith, Robin East) are, then a future in Documentum development may remain a strong option. After all, EMC has resurrected its commitment toward empowering and encouraging integrators to build business specific solutions using its xCP platform, so it follows that opportunities at those companies should grow. (CAUTION: Those in the USA and Europe should note that many of these integrators are developing their solutions offshore, though they aren't always open about it.)

Why I'm Bullish on EMC's strategy for Documentum

God knows I don’t hold back when I think EMC is off-the-mark with its Documentum offering, so it’s only fair that I sing their praises when they do something to delight. 

Now I’ve already written about the company’s  “ECM Your Way” vision which promises to make it easy for end users to access, collaborate and interface with Documentum via any means that they choose ( via Box, Cisco Quad, MyDocumentum, Sharepoint etc…) as well as its pledge to deliver these services via any device (the iPad interface is expected first and should become available in the third quarter of 2011).

EMC Documentum hears the beat of a generation that won't wait

Note: Blogging from EMC World.

Documentum sits at the top of the EMC stack, so it has to be end-user friendly. I've been shouting about this for the past several years and now it seems that EMC FINALLY gets it. (Not because of anything that I've said, of course.)

The Documentum you'll see, in the very near future, is going to look alot more like the technologies you use in your personal life: it's going to be social; it's going to be mobile; it's going to be accessible from the device and through the interface of your choice. It will play nicely with other platforms and technologies. It will stay in the conversation when you say "open source".

EMC is partnering with external vendors to add features and functionalities for its customers that it is not yet ready to offer.

• Take content mobility (access-ability via the cloud) as an example, that feature will be delivered via Box.net.
• Collaboration via Cisco Quad.
• There will be mobile apps. The iPad interface will be available in the very near future, RIM and iPhone will follow soon after. New iterations should appear every few months.
• Much of this will be accomplished on an open platform so that it can evolve quickly enough.

At EMC World- Will EMC's Big Data strategy include Documentum?

EMC World starts tomorrow (Monday, May 8) and I’ve heard that there should be some interesting news about Documentum.

  My hope is that EMC will finally tell us how Content Management fits into its overall strategy and that it will mean more jobs and opportunities for Documentum Pros. The latter (the more jobs part) isn't EMC's purpose, of course; creating value for its stocholders and customers is. Still, it would be a nice side-benefit.

You see job growth for Documentum pros is worse than flat; it’s in decline. If this continues, there will be more Documentum professionals avaiable than jobs requiring their expertise. Needless to say, that’s a bad thing for those of you who are deeply invested in the technology; it will affect your marketability and,  if you don’t move on from it, your pay. Don't misunderstand me, Documentum -related jobs won't completely vanish, but companues will no longer need to pay you a premium.

The theme of this year’s EMC World is "Cloud meets Big Data".

While “cloud computing” is a term that you’re probably all familiar with, Big Data may be new to you. I’ve been learning about it for the past year. My interest was first pinged when I interviewed the founders of MyCityWay and New York Mayor Bloomberg's office for the NY Post. It was tagged again when I saw that IA Ventures was filling its portfolio with Big Data firms. And then again when Om Malik of Giga Om invited me to cover his Big Data Conference.

It was there that I became convinced that Big Data was the next technology that Brilliant Leap was going to specialize in. We’re only now beginning to recognize how much data we can process and how much we can learn from our new found ability. We’ve barely begun to recognize the problems this can help us solve and the gains it can bring to not only enterprises, individuals and our economy, but also to society as a whole.

Brilliant Leap believes that we’re on the brink of a Big Data revolution and we want to be part of it.

All of that being said, I’m not  sure that there’s a link between ECM and Big Data from an occupational perspective; the skills and training required to excel in these two areas are very different. (One calls  mostly for middleware solution architects, configurators  developers and administrators, the other calls for computer scientists, math geniuses, storytellers, information architects and experts who can usurp critical information from petabytes of data.  Forecasters say that the supply of experts in the latter will not be sufficient for at least ten years. We’re already beginning to hear about the shortage from our clients in the  Financial, Consumer Products, Healthcare,  internet/Media/Social Web industries.

If  you’re at all curious about Big Data, we’ve started a blog that discusses it from a very high level (thus far). There’s also a great video of Jeff Jonas speaking at the GigaOm Conference; it’s  both entertaining and informative.

And, though it may seem that  I’ve digressed from my ECM topic, I’m saying all of this because I’m sincerely hoping that Joe Tuccil explains how ECM fits into EMC’s Big Data Strategy. Not only that, but that it’s something more than the fact that your ECM Apps and data that reside on the cloud can be more easily leveraged by Greenplum Map Reduce, Cassandra, and Hadoop.

Monday is just a few hours away, we will see.

Follow me on Twitter @BrilliantLeap and/or @BigDataGeeks

 

EMC Documentum Exec Joins Box.net- Should you care?

I'm guessing that most of you don't pay all that much attention to the comings and goings in ECM-vendor land, so unless you follow me @BrilliantLeap or Laurence Hart @piewords on Twitter, you may not know that long time Documentum marketing maven Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck has left EMC.

When Hart heard the news, he worried that the citizens of Documentum-land might panic, or jump to wrong conclusions, about yet another senior level exec leaving EMC's ECM group. Like a reassuring Papa Bear, he assured his readers that Whitney was leaving for her own reasons, not because something was wrong with Documentum (or EMC's ECM group, or IIG or whatever we're calling it this year.)

ECM's "big thinkers" share an Aha! moment

Someone please explain, why is it a radical idea to put ECM technology users at the center of their content rather than an ECM system at the center of their content?

User-centered design has, after all, been around since the early 1990's and end-users typically foot the bill for solutions, don't they? Aren't they, and not IT, a technology company's real customers? 

To me this seems obvious, but ECM speakers and bloggers seem to be experiencing Oprah-like "Aha! moment" around this idea. Better late than never, I guess. I was talking about this with a good friend last night- he's one of the smartest computer engineers I know.

He explained the evolution of a new technology to me this way:

1. An emerging technology has few features and is hard to use.
2. A developing technology grows many new features but remains hard to use.
3. A mature technology keeps the good features and becomes easy to use.

The Game-Changer for Enterprise Content Management

There's a term I don't hear mentioned in the ECM world very often, at least until last Tuesday that is. What am I talking about? User-experience. Chris Preston of EMC called it a "game-changer" at AIIM's info360 Conference last week.

Hooray! I wanted to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming when I heard the words. And, if I wasn't, I wanted to give him a standing ovation. A bit over-dramatic? Don't think so. If EMC had realized this five years ago, Sharepoint might not have won some of Documentum's marketshare, and if CenterStage had been ready,  vigilante corporate teams wouldn't be working with MarkLogic or clandestinely checking-out Box.

But what's past is past. The good news is that enterprise ECM vendors seem to be finally learning things from consumer-facing software designers; namely that that it's their customers' customers that they need to please. Sure, you sell to IT, but the end-users foot the bill for the product and, if they ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

 

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey drove this point home in a talk he recently gave to his team at Square, the hot new payment processing company he now runs. Here's part of what he said:

I want to talk about how we build things here, a little bit about the product, the work we do and the work we need to do. So, this is something I put on our Wiki a long time ago, as one of our principles is to delight our users. But then I realized it’s more important to delight their users, which are their customers and payers. And the more we focus on that payer experience, the more we focus on really making that magical — and designing it. We win, our users win, and we get more users.

And a lot of people think of design, when they hear the word design as visual, something that looks pretty. Design is not just visual, design is efficiency. Design is making something simple. Design is epic. Design is making it easy for a user to get from point A to point B.

Engineering is design. Every engineer in this room, every operator in this room, every customer service agent in this room, is a designer. Because you’re designing constantly the interaction that you have with your tools or with your users or with your customers, and you’re trying to bring efficiency and take all the thinking out of that process.

Info360 Conference- Will Box.net be a disruptor?

AIIM (the Enterprise Content Management Association) is kicking off its annual conference tomorrow. It could be a rather interesting event. There's a disruptive vendor (Box.net) in the morning's lineup; its co-founder Aaron Levie is giving a talk "Making Enterprise Software Sexy. No, Seriously."

While I'm looking forward to hearing what Levie has to say, I wish I could tap into the thoughts of the traditional ECM vendors (Documentum, Open Text,IBM/Lotus Notes/ FileNet) as they listen to him. Can Box.net compete in terms of features, fuctionalities, compliance and secure collaboration? 

What does Microsoft and Alfresco think of Box.net? We know that Box.net thinks that you'll prefer it over Sharepoint. (See picture.)

Can/should/will legacy vendors play nice with Box?

In my fantasy life (when it comes to ECM presentations), the stage at AIIM tomorrow would look something like this:

HP sets its course for the Cloud, Big Data and Analytics. EMC no like

Watching the tech world can make movies like Wall Street seem kind of boring. Here corporate leaders and employee bloggers use strobe lights to illuminate flaws in each other's business strategies; they taunt each other's marketing campaigns on YouTube, and sometimes they even sue their employees when they jump to a competitor's ship. Grant it, these behemoths have something to fight over-- position, customers, and a market that's worth billions of dollars; but they don't cop to that, instead they poke holes in one another's business strategies. 

Earlier this week Hewlett Packard's new CEO, Leo Apotheker, laid out his vision for HP's future. And while some of it centered around consumer devices which run/will run the much talked about Web OS, Apotheker's focus was on HP's planned enterprise service offerings which center around the cloud, Big Data and real-time analytics. It's the same formula that's being used by many vendors.

Now while most stayed mum while HP had its say, Chuck Hollis EMC's VP – Global Marketing CTO did not. Instead he wrote a blog post that ever so subtly referred to HP as a "beast" and a "big elephant" (nothing sexy or sleek or agile conjured up by those images) and then went on about why HP's decision to offer cloud services (we do it for you)Vs. cloud enabling technologies (we give you the stuff and the services you need to do it yourself) may be the wrong choice.

It didn't take long before storage expert, Marc Farley of HP, reacted to Hollis' post on Twitter, calling it a FUD 

What's the Big Deal About Big Data?

What's the big deal about Big Data? I asked this question of a client about six months ago. He had come to me requesting that I conduct a search for his firm- he needed two sharp Knowledge Management/Content Management experts who were eager to extend their experience into this "new" frontier.

"What's the big deal about Big Data? Your kidding, right?" said my client. There was both laughter and disbelief in his voice. Without him needing to say it, he was telling me that this was something I should know.

Now I knew that he'd trust me with the assignment anyway, and this would be an opportunity for me to learn more. In exchange for letting me pick his brain, there'd be some ribbing to bear in my future; he'd remind me, and everyone we knew in common, that there was a time when I didn't know what the big deal about Big Data was about.